This is an excerpt from my friend Nate’s recent blog post “How to Get Millions of Users“, which is a great distillation of some big and heady thoughts tying product design, development, marketing, and onboarding all together in a nice little package. It’s a pretty long post, but read it all. I promise it’s worth it:

When we build products for groups of people we aim for a fictitious middle. While we’re trying to make something people LOVE we make assumption about what they love. It would be like saying to your girlfriend “I hear women LOVE Victoria’s Secret. Go try this on.” when in actuality some women might like that but she really loves sweat pants; taken as an individual, demographics mean jack.

When we build products for real people — starting with ourselves — however, we know exactly what to build.

Before he launched Foursquare, Dennis Crowley would go around saying “I just want a Leaderboard for my Saturday night and I want to be at the top of it.” Foursquare wasn’t just built for himself, it was built with a very specific set of friends in mind — those he spent his Saturday night’s with.

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Freelancers everywhere. Lend me your ears.

Working at home is great, in theory. You wake up, make yourself an omelet (or don’t), pull on some sweats and start the day. There is no wasted time commuting and no meetings to attend. Your boss isn’t checking how often you’re on Facebook or asking questions about your progress. Better yet, there’s no guy with bad body odor playing Michael Bolton in the cubicle next door. Life is sweet.

If only it were that simple. In real life there’s no time for omelets. You’re busy managing multiple tasks and looking for projects on top of a supposedly healthy social life.  But doing quality work takes more than just time. It takes motivation. Some can function from the comfort of their couches or kitchen tables. Others, not so much.

At the local coffee shop you wait 20 minutes for a table, only to find walls with no outlets and a weak wireless connection. Hours later you look at your clock and realize you’ve been there 3 hours and all you have to show for it is an empty latte and nothing done. It’s enough to make you swear off coffee.

Where’s the happy medium? Inspiration comes from surrounding yourself with inspiring people, but nobody likes to be micromanaged.

Hackers in Residence is for freelance developers and designers looking for office space and project opportunities. Use our space in exchange for a fraction of your time to work on projects for our sprouts. You reap the benefits of a laid-back, creative atmosphere while maintaining a constant work flow and access to our resources and networks. Better yet, you can get health care at the SproutBox group rate.

Best of both worlds? We think so.

Interested? See our Opportunities page for more information on how to apply and what we’re looking for.

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Sometimes designing a logo and branding a product can be difficult for a designer to grasp. Honestly, even with a decade of experience, I still struggle sometimes. But like all good designers must do, I’ve learned to buckle down and keep working to hone in on the process.

The first step to creating a great brand or logo, is devising a memorable name. It needs to be something simple, that grasps attention, but most importantly, it needs to represent the product or company. One way to brainstorm names is to write down words that describe the product. Free associating these words can help you come up with a name that captures the essence of the brand. Trust me, eventually the right name will come to you.

The second step is to sketch out some logos. This is the big one. I know it’s easy to just jump in and start working in Photoshop or Illustrator, but it’s really helpful to get your ideas down on paper first. This step will save you a lot of time and headaches down the road. Your drawing ability doesn’t matter, at this stage even stick figures will help. You just need to get the ideas moving in your mind.

For my third step, I start selecting fonts. This can be the third or fourth step, it’s up to you, but I prefer to get it out of the way. Font selection and typography can be a huge weakness for designers, I know sometimes it is for me. These tips might help you with selecting a font that captures the essence of the brand.

I highly recommend getting a font management application. They are very useful, especially when you have a large font library like me. For Apple I recommend Linotype FontExplorer X, and for Windows I recommend getting an Apple… Zing! Just kidding, I recommend Linotype for Windows as well. It’s awesome, it makes it easy to add fonts, and it has a set creation feature for organizing individual projects. Once you get your fonts added to your library, just start adding ones you like to your project set. It doesn’t matter if you use them or not, but it will help with your design process. If you are having trouble finding fonts you like, there are tons of free font sites out there.

Here are just a few I’d recommend.

• http://www.theleagueofmoveabletype.com/
• http://www.dafont.com/
• http://www.smashingmagazine.com/category/fonts/

On to the forth step: color. Color can be just as tricky as fonts, especially for projects that need to be both a print piece and a website. My recommendation for designers who need to make a logo that can straddle the line between print and web is to design first in CMYK and move it over to RGB later. The theory behind this approach is the same one that applies to resolution in images: “garbage in, garbage out”. You don’t want to res images up, you want to start with quality. The same principle applies in color. Good print colors are harder to hone in on, you need to get the hard stuff set up and move to a more forgiving color range, i.e. RGB.

Fifth, we get to the meat of the project: bringing it all together and creating your artwork. Depending on your skill set, you may find its better to keep the logo fairly simple. Often times it’s easy to get carried away and design a logo with a lot to it. However, you may find that the most simple logos are the most effective. The best rule I ever learned was k.i.s.s. “keep it simple stupid”. Just because your company is selling widgets doesn’t mean you should show that widget in the logo. Using a font and a nice color scheme can be just as a effective as a graphic.

Finally we get our end result, a completed logo and brand. In the case of CheddarGetter it took lots of meetings and work to get a final result that everyone was happy with.

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